DVD region locked, what options do I have?

Hey guys, forgive me if anything like this has been posted previously. I have searched but not come up with quite the answers I'm looking for.

I'm in the UK and have a couple of American DVD's from family who live over in the US. Now, I've only gone and locked up the dvd drive into Region 1, and I've got about 5% US dvd's as appose to a huge amount of UK region dvds.

What options do I have? I'm planning on ringing Apple tomorrow morning regarding this problem to see if they can help me in any way, I've got the AppleCare thing, but I doubt this is covered by it.

I've also searched around for any dvd media players for the mac, much like a few I had previous on the windows laptop, which allowed me to play any region of DVD.

Hopefully someone can help, I really don't fancy living with this problem for much longer as my laptop is the most used device for watching dvds etc.

Thanks,

Simon.

An external DVD player isn't really a good option as I move about a lot.

The VLC player doesn't seem to work for my DVD's, I don't know if its because I'm at the region change limit.